When is stressing about toxins more toxic than the toxins you're trying to avoid?

There is a new book out called Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives by Annie Murphy Paul. Now I haven't actually gotten my hands on the book itself yet, but just reading this review, titled "Panic Womb" by Judith Woods was enough to get me thinking...

According to Woods' review, the book is all about "how babies are susceptible to stress and household chemicals, pollution that their mother breathes and the range of emotions she feels".  Now this is of course not news to me, since the whole point of me starting this blog was to share information about how eliminating toxins during the pre-conception period can help you get pregnant easier, faster and have a healthier pregnancy and child. But the interesting point that this raises for me is... if the toxins are bad, and the stress is bad, then what happens when we are stressing about toxins?

Having been mindful of my emotional environment as well as my ecological environment while pregnant, I've been trying to minimize stress through yoga and meditation, and generally just not giving a sh*t about stuff wherever possible. But sometimes I do find myself losing sleep over thoughts such as: "should I be wearing gloves while doing my taxes because there's BPA in most of my receipts?" or "how long should I let the new car seat off-gas before it's going to be safe enough?" and "I know oily fish like sardines and salmon are good for the baby's brain, but the cans are probably lined with BPA, so should I eat them or not?!".

At what point does all this stressing (especially when it's unproductive stressing) cause more harm to the fetus that the BPA, VOCs etc that I'm trying to avoid?

I'm also curious to find out more about the idea that "moderate stress accelerates the development of the baby's nervous system; women who report modest anxiety and daily stress have children with better motor and mental development scores at the age of two" (from Woods' review).

I guess I better buy the book, or maybe I shouldn't, if it's just going to give me more things to stress about... what do you think?

How toxic is your bathroom? Part I

I visited a friend's house recently and I practically had to hold my breath to avoid inhaling toxic fumes from all the cleaning products. I can't help but wonder how many everyday household products might be impacting on our fertility. There are of course many many factors that influence fertility. I came across a good article on Dr Mercola's website recently: 10 Ways to Address Your Root Causes of Infertility -- Naturally by Swiss Naturopath Iva Keene. Iva's number one recommendation for treating infertility is to minimize your exposure to toxic chemicals. Bearing this in mind I started wondering how much trouble (and expense) it would be to do a "Non-Toxic Makeover" for my friends' house.

I'd start in the bathroom...

1. A clip-on toilet bowl freshener/cleaner. You only have to read this recent article from the New York Times about what to do if someone accidently swallows toilet bowl cleaning fluid to know that these are seriously nasty chemicals. If that's not enough to scare you off, how about this from A Guide to Less Toxic Products? "Many toilet bowl cleaners are often highly caustic and form toxic gases when mixed with water. They can contain ammonium chloride, a corrosive, 1,4-dichlorobenzine, a carcinogenic pesticide which can cause liver and kidney damage, hydrochloric acid, whose vapours can cause coughing and breathing difficulties, and sodium dichloroisocyanurate dihydrate which is a severe eye, skin and respiratory irritant, which can form carcinogenic chlorine gas. Sulfate-based products containing sodium sulfate or sodium bisulfate may cause asthmatic attacks." Enough said.

2. An aerosol room freshener with synthetic fragrance. I knew these were nasty, but I had no idea just how nasty until I read this (again from A Guide to Less Toxic Products) "Far from freshening air, chemical-based air fresheners and deodorizers add dangerous chemicals to the air we breathe. Air fresheners work by using a nerve-deadening chemical that interferes with our sense of smell, by coating nasal passage with an oily film, by masking an offending odour with a different odour, or by deactivating the odour." That's before they even go into all the toxic chemicals ingredients in air fresheners (formadehyde, a carcinogen and sensitizer, naphthalene, a suspected carcinogen, xylene, a neurotoxin and possible reproductive toxin, butane gas, a neurotoxin, cresol, ethanol, phenol and strong fragrances... etc).

3. The hand soap. Long gone are the days when soap was just soap. Most commercial hand soap dispensers come with an ingredient list a mile long, and you'll need to have your copy of The Chemical Maze handy to interpret them. Now with Swine Flu people are much more likely to buy anti-bacterial hand soap, but of course H1N1 is a virus, not a bacteria, so it won't help, and antibacterial soaps are an unhealthy choice for several reasons, which you can read about here.

Interestingly enough, The Guide to Less Toxic Products states that "The US Center for Disease Control says that anti-bacterial soaps are not necessary. They recommend that the simplest and most effective thing people can do to reduce the spread of infectious disease is to use effective handwashing, especially after using the bathroom and before preparing or eating food. Proper handwashing means rubbing hands under running water for 15 seconds." This sounds like great advice to me, but I couldn't find it anywhere on the CDC website. I did find evidence of a CDC site on hand washing that had been "retired". Presumably this was where the advice that "anti-bacterial soaps are not necessary" came from. In its place I found the CDC's new "Ounce of Prevention" campaign, which has been kindly brought to us by Reckitt Benckiser. Who on Earth is Reckitt Benckiser you might be wondering? I'd never heard of them, but I was pretty sure they had no business funding public health campaigns for the CDC. Jumping on Wikipedia confirmed my suspicions.

Reckitt Benckiser are the makers of Lysol, among other highly toxic household chemical brands such as Finish, Vanish, Air Wick, Dettol, Cillit Bang, Harpic, Air Wick, Mortein, Mop & Glo, Mr. Sheen (etc, etc). For a full list scroll all the way down on this page.

I'm pretty pissed off at my government right now, for taking money (even if it is an "unrestricted educational grant toward the development of materials and programs") from the makers of so many toxic household chemicals, including Lysol, which is so clearly profiteering from Swine Flu Hysteria. Check out their website, it's fear-mongering at its most blatent.

But I digress. And I'm going to digress further still. I found a lovely little tidbit on wikipedia while researching Reckitt Benckiser and Lysol. Did you know that "In the US, from around 1930 to 1960, vaginal douching with a Lysol disinfectant solution was the most popular form of birth control"? If you don't believe me check out this Lysol Douche ad from 1948. I can only imagine the litany of health problems that would have been caused by regular douching with lysol?!

Ok so back to my original topic. So what do you use to replace the toxic toilet bowl cleaners, air fresheners and hand soaps?

That depends on how much money you want to spend. Most things can be kept clean and fresh with very simple and affordable items such as baking soda, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, etc. If you don't like the smell you can make a very dilute spray with some safe, certified organic essential oils. A nice, all-purpose product is Dr Bronner's Baby Mild Liquid Soap. You can use this to wash your hands, and anything else on your body or your house.

If you prefer something a bit more conventional, but non-toxic, then I recommend the miessence certified organic, refillable foaming hand soap, the certified organic Rainforest Air Freshener, and for cleaning the toilet (and every other part of your bathroom and kitchen) BioPure Probiotic Household Cleaning Concentrate. Instead of killing all the bugs, good and bad, BioPure populates household surfaces with friendly bugs, which means that the pathogenic bugs cannot survive. This is the safest and most effective way to keep your house clean.

I'm sorry that this post was so long, it turned into a bit of a tirade. And there's more to come, watch out for Part II...

The good new is, once you have gotten pregnant, Dr Mercola has a bunch of great tips on how to have a Naturally Healthy Pregnancy and Baby.

how to get pregnant

For us getting pregnant was a journey that started two years before our son was born, when I bought the book The Natural Way to Better Babies: Preconception Health Care for Prospective Parents by Francesca Naish and Janette Roberts. The book was also published in America as Healthy Parents, Better Babies: A Couple's Guide to Natural Preconception Health Care. Around the same time, my Mother-in-law gave me a copy of The Chemical Maze, which is published in the USA as Eat Safe: The Truth about Additives from Aspartame to Xanthan Gum. Together these two books changed my life more than any others. I already thought I was being pretty green and healthy with my lifestyle choices, but this was my wake up call that a lot of products I was using in my house and on my body were not safe for me or the planet, especially not if I wanted to conceive and give birth to a healthy baby.

When I actually started reading all the ingredients (or tracking down the ingredients when they weren't listed) I found that I had to get rid of about 90% of what I was using. It took me a whole year to find effective replacements for all the synthetic chemicals in my life... I threw out mountains of personal care products and had to find a safe way to dispose of most of my cleaning products. It was during this year that I tried everything on offer in every health shop in Melbourne (not a cheap exercise). I found a few brands that stood up to my new criteria, ie nothing toxic. This is harder than you might think. Most of the products that claimed to be "green", "natural" or "organic" were mostly the same old chemicals dressed up with a couple of new ingredients, ie greenwashing. I had to educate myself as a consumer, and learn how to read a label and de-code all the ingredient names. I checked everything against the Chemical Maze (you can download a free excerpt of it here).

I was not being crazy, I was just a bit ahead of my time. Since then (five years ago) there have been many more books and articles published on how chemicals can decrease our fertility and increase our chances of health problems after exposure in the womb. Just this week Newsweek published an article on how exposure to chemicals (including BPA) as babies can make us fat later in life. And Gabriela Rosa has written books like The Awful Truth About Cleaning Products And Fertility Revealed and Protecting Your Fertility.

The concept of pre-conception health care has become so mainstream in the last five years that now even major pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer, which makes Elevit and Menevit, has published a booklet on how to boost your fertility. Amazingly, they have included a paragraph on "going natural" which states that naturopathy, acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicines, homeopathy, and hypnotherapy have all had reported successes in helping couples get pregnant. I can vouch for that, we did everything (except the hypnotherapy, but we used that for childbirth!) and we got pregnant the first time we tried, but of course that was after four months of detoxing, and a whole year of research and preparation before that. Normally I wouldn't recommend trying so many different tactics, but there's no harm done here (except for the cost) because all of these things (especially the detox) will help your general health and wellbeing, even if you could have gotten pregnant without doing it all.

The other things which have become more mainstream (and are recommended by Bayer) are to stop not just smoking, but to also give up alcohol and caffeine before you start trying. They point out that high caffeine intake can stop a fertilized egg implanting. It's not just women who have to cut out the bad stuff, it goes for men too, caffeine can increase sperm DNA damage and smoking and alcohol also reduce sperm quality. This is not some crazy health-nut idea, this is a major multi-national pharmaceutical company telling you this: if you're thinking about getting pregnant, or having trouble getting pregnant, then try cutting out alcohol, cigarettes and caffeine. I would add to that to replace all of your household and personal products with safe, natural, certified organic versions, such as miessence and Seventh Generation. It also helps to eat fresh, local, organic whole foods, sleep well, get plenty of exercise, fresh air and good sleep. Stress can actually play as big a part in (not) getting pregnant as anything else I've mentioned. So make some big changes, but try not to stress about them :-) Your body, your baby and the planet will thank you!

while I fry an organic egg...

So we started the official 6 month pre-conception detox on Monday, and I've been wanting to blog about it but feeling overwhelmed about where to start and therefore have been doing nothing... so I thought I'd do a super-fast, while I fry an egg post to get started. It's all about baby-steps. I might end up doing a bunch of mini-posts, since I seem to be much better at micro-blogging on twitter these days at the expense of my real blog...
so here's my tip-of-the-day.

When preparing for conception, and during pregnancy and breastfeeding it is essential to maintain good supplies of iron. A lot of iron supplements aren't easily absorbed and/or make you constipated... thankfully I've found one that works beautifully, it's called Spatone, and it's simply spa water from Wales (from the spa in the picture) that's naturally very high in iron. One small sachet can be taken in water or juice, and is safe for kids over 2 years old. Pregnant women can get enough iron by taking two sachets a day. I love that it is so simple and natural, and it comes from a company that I have used and trusted for a long time, Martin & Pleasance, which also makes Rescue Remedy, a wonderful combination of Bach Flower Remedies that helped me through my law exams and helped my husband with his fear of flying!

Iron is essential to the body for many reasons, not least of which is that it helps carry oxygen around your body! Pregnant women need at least twice as much iron as the rest of us, and growing children need a lot of iron too. I would not hesitate to recommend Spatone to anyone and everyone! Stay tuned for more info on what supplements I'm using to support my body during my mindful period of pre-conception health optimization!

p.s. I actually fried an egg, ate it, fried another egg, ate that too, and I'm still going... so much for short posts...

p.p.s I have no association with Spatone or Martin and Pleasance whatsover, however if they want to send me some free stuff to review I won't complain! ;-)

do I really want a girl?

So I got bored with all the cervical mucus and basal body temperature stuff (I will go back and read it, after I finish reading the juicy bits) and skipped ahead to the "How to have a girl" chapter of How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby: Fully revised and updated. Basically, it's harder to make girls than boys, unless your husband is really toxic and your vagina is really acidic. The science behind this is real, but more than I feel like explaining right now, other than to say that the "girl sperm" are much hardier than the "boy sperm" so they survive better under hostile conditions, such as hot, cramped tighty whities, men who spend lots of time underwater (scuba divers) or in the air (pilots and astronauts) or men with toxic jobs, such as anesthesiologists apparently. So basically, if we want to have a girl, DH can try to kill off all the "boy sperm" by being rather hot and toxic, or I can try to kill them off by being acidic...

top 10 things I am doing differently this time around...

As many of you know, my husband and I did a four month detox before getting pregnant with our son, almost four years ago! Something must have worked because we got pregnant right away :-) It's time to start preparing for #2, so we are gearing up for another detox. This time it's going to be SIX LONG MONTHS of no caffeine, no alcohol, no dairy, no wheat, etc etc. Why the longer detox? The theory we used for the first one is that

it takes roughly four months for eggs and sperm to "mature" before conception,

so you want your body to be in peak condition during those four months.

The fatal flaw in our plan was that we STARTED the detox four months before conception, but that doesn't mean we were detoxed for four months... it takes a while... in fact, we can never be truly detoxed in modern society... even Indigenous Peoples living in the Arctic have a body burden of PCBs, VOCs, and other POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants - the wrong kind of organic), that are in our air and water and fish that no one can avoid unless we move to another planet, in which case we will receive a mega dose of cosmic radiation. (Another thing I am doing differently this time is that I am not going to fly while pregnant).

So the problem is that doing a four month detox is not enough, because you spend the first few weeks/months being MORE TOXIC than usual, as your body flushes everything from your system... so you need a buffer period to get out as many of the toxins as you can so that you can have four months of being as clean as possible.

So, off the top of my head (but with years of thought and research put into it), these are the things that we are doing differently in the lead up to making baby #2:

1. I will start detoxing six months before conception instead of four.
2. I will not fly on an airplane for six months before conception (or during pregnancy - I flew from Australia to America, across America four times and then back to Australia while I was pregnant with #1- that's a lot of cosmic radiation!)
3. I have had my mercury amalgam fillings removed well before starting the detox for #2 (I had two such toxic fillings during #1's conception and pregnancy).
4. I am not going to drive in a new car during my detox or pregnancy (we bought a new car just before #1 was born, so he spent his first few years inhaling a cocktail of VOCs and other nasty off-gassings).
5. I'm not working in a job that stresses me out, or with people that stress me out. Stress hormones are not good for babies (or mothers-to-be).
6. I'm getting bioresonance therapy with a Bicom2000 machine from the lovely Michele at Recharge Life in Melbourne. Bioresonance therapy is one of the few modalities that can help eliminate allergies and food intolerances.
7. I'm cutting way down on the naturally-occurring food chemicals in my diet, such as amines and salicylates, that I now know I am sensitive to.
8. I'm going to get a filter for my shower and bath so that I am not inhaling and absorbing so much chlorine when I bathe... if anyone can recommend some good filters then please leave a comment!
9. I'm not going to get any ultrasounds/sonograms during my pregnancy. I know I can have a healthy baby, I don't care if it's a boy or a girl (see previous post) and if it's twins the midwives will be able to tell soon enough.
10. I'm going to spend more time in the sun. Baby and me need our vitamin D!

is it possible to choose the sex of your baby?

According to Dr Landrum Shettles and David Rorvik, the authors of How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby: Fully revised and updated you can give yourself a 75-80% chance of having a girl, and a 80-90% chance of having a boy. We must have been unwittingly using the "boy method" when we first got pregnant. I don't actually know, since I've only read the first 12 pages of the book. I borrowed it from a friend (who was trying to have a boy... she tried for a year without getting pregnant, then gave up and got pregnant right away with another girl). I'm not really going to enter into the whole ethical debate about whether or not it's a good thing for people to be able to choose the sex of their babies. I think the short answer is that it's probably good/bad/indifferent depending on the situation. In our situation we're pretty sure we only want to have two kids. We already have a boy, we'd be thrilled to have another healthy baby no matter what the gender (I know everyone says that, but we really mean it ), but I'm kinda intrigued by the idea of trying out this method, and since we already know we can make boys, we're going to try to make a girl. The only comment I'll make on the ethics of sex selection is to quote from the first chapter of the book to say that the late, great anthropologist '

Dr Margaret Mead "strongly favored the use of sex selection because, she argued, 'for the first time in human history, girls would be as wanted as boys.'

What she meant was that if a girl was the product of sex selection she could grow up secure in the knowledge that she had truly been wanted and was not simply the child her parents had 'settled for' when they failed to have a son."

So we'll give it a go, but only because we'll be trying for a girl... apparently trying for a boy involves the man having two strong cups of coffee just before having sex, and that won't really go well with our preconception detox...

and now for the good news....

DH suggested that I write something positive for a change... and luckily I have something positive to say! Since I discovered that I am sensitive to salicylates and amines, and have been off them for over a month, I have just made it through the first few days of my period without taking any drugs... this may not sound impressive, or it may be too much information, but for me it is huge. I have had painful periods for most of my life. They get better when I'm on the pill, but the pill has lots of problems (story for another day) so I've been off it for a few years, and this makes my periods worse. Drugs help (especially Ibuprofen) but they also have problems (another story for yet another day) so I have been keen to get off them too, as they don't really fit in with my super-healthy pre-conception plan. So this is a real breakthrough for me! I still needed a hot water bottle to get through the day, but I made it drug-free, which helps to make up for the fact that I haven't eaten any fruit except pears for a long time!

I feel like crap, so the detox must be working…

I don’t feel that bad, just a bit like I’ve been hit by a truck. I’m exhausted without doing anything. I’m not sick, nothing hurts, I just have very little energy, and as DH just discovered, I’m a bit sensitive and grumpy! I’m trying to make the most of the process, lazy hours reading in bed, or just lying in bed doing nothing. I’m not that sleepy, just wiped out. I just had a nice long hot bath with lots of baking soda (helps to draw out the toxins) while sipping a cup of dandelion tea (helps the liver detox) that DH kindly made for me. He is doing very well with his detox. His main issue is tea, which he loves, but he gets terrible headaches when he doesn’t have enough at the right time. When we did the first detox three and a half years ago he was pretty sick for a week while he went through the caffeine withdrawl. This time around he is doing it more gradually. Cutting out coffee first, then switching to a low-caffeine Ceylon tea, and then to white tea. While he has had mild headaches at times, it’s a lot more pleasant than the first time around! That is one of the advantages of starting the detox six months before we want to conceive… we’re not in a quite so much of a hurry, so we can take a gentler approach.

There are also lots of things that we have cut out completely since the first time around, such as toxic household and persona care products. While we are still not perfect in this arena, there are a lot toxins in our lives these days, so the detox is not as much hard work as it was the first time. The second time round I am focusing more on adding in nourishing, beneficial foods and supplements to our diet, than on cutting out bad ones. The main things I have to cut out (not that I have much of them to begin with) are sugar, alcohol and caffeine (in that order). I’m already non-dairy and gluten-free, so that makes things easier.

I really don’t have much sugar, since I’m allergic to most things that have sugar in them, but it sneaks into your diet in insidious ways…. ketchup, jam, toothpaste (not mine) peanut butter (which I don’t eat, but it’s in the sunflower substitute I like), etc. I already avoid corn syrup (one of THE most EVIL “foods” around) religiously. So for me it’s things like honey, fruit juices, dried fruit, and other things with naturally occurring sugars.

Alcohol is probably the worst thing I have regularly, but I only have a few glasses a week, usually of organic red wine. Red wine does have some health benefits, but it is also pretty hard on the liver, so I’m taking a break during the detox, and the pregnancy, and the breastfeeding, so I’m pretty much not going to be able to have wine for about the next 3 years. Now I’m going to cry. I must admit I did drink the occasional half glass of wine while breastfeeding the first time around. But I absolutely did not drink at all during pregnancy. I was also very very good during the four month detox before getting pregnant, however I did have one bad night at a friends wedding in Bali only a few weeks before getting pregnant. My son can blame any of his future health problems on that night. The good thing is that I was already so detoxed that by body would have been able to process the alcohol very quickly. Or so I keep telling myself.

The caffeine thing is pretty easy for me, since I don’t really like black tea, and I only have coffee once or twice a month, since it gives me the jitters. My main source of caffeine is dark chocolate, which is very hard to resist, and very good for you, if it’s not combined with too much sugar and other processed additives. My one deviation from the detox since last wrote was a piece of vegan, gluten-free chocolate cake. It’s so rare that I can find pastries that I’m not totally allergic to that I couldn’t resist… But if that’s the worst thing I had all week I think I’m doing pretty well… Now I’m off to apply my detox foot patches (more on these soon) and go to bed!

it all starts NOW!

So this is it. The BIG detox. It all starts now. Actually it was supposed to start on Friday, and I was pretty good on friday, no caffeine, no alcohol, no sugar... but then it was saturday, and someone offered me a decaf rice milk cappuccino (yes I am a freak) and I couldn't say no, as it's not often you can have such an obscure beverage, and then someone else offered me a glass of wine on saturday night, and I felt that I really needed to have one last farewell drink, given that I am giving it it for probably the next three years or so... so I did. But now I'm done... no more toxins will be entering my body if I can help it. There are a lot of toxins I can't help.... such as living in a major city, but I'm going to take control of the more controllable ones, such as what goes into my mouth and onto my skin, and what comes into my house, and more importantly, what I'm kicking out!

Why am I doing this to myself you may ask?

Because I want to have another organic baby.

Not now. Not in nine months. But in 15 months. So I'm starting now. Last time we started detoxing four months before conceiving. That was the minimum time recommended based on the maturation of eggs and sperm. (More on this soon). But this time I'm starting a bit early, as I want the actual detox to be done four months before we start, so that we just have four months of optimal health as the eggs and sperm are preparing. And yes, that means DH is doing it too! He's currently weaning himself off his rather serious caffeine addiction, so I'm typing very quietly.... shhhhh.

I promise to update the blog at least once a week until we get pregnant (and beyond). And you, my dear blog readers will be the first to know. This will be the step-by-step guide to making an organic baby that I have been promising for so long.... here it is. Enjoy.

quicky on organic cotton, safe bath products and preconception detox

ok, so the results of my poll were a three-way tie, so I'll do a quicky on all three... more to come when I have time (when will that be???).

Organic Cotton: good for you, good for the environment, good for the workers in the cotton fields... it's softer... what more do you need to know???? Baby clothes, blankets, towels, wash cloths, bedding, stuffed animals, furniture, tampons, you name it, you can find an organic cotton version of it... for example, I just searched for organic cotton on Amazon and found everything from organic cotton broccoli (seriously, I've attached a picture in case you don't believe me), to organic cotton gloves.

Regarding safe bath products for baby... the safest product is water, and most babies don't need anything else for the first year... even then they really don't need much. If you absolutely must use a shampoo or bubble bath, then I recommend miessence desert flower shampoo and sunflower body wash (doubles as a bubble bath). Yes, I sell them, and I hate recommending things I sell, lest you think I am being biased, but I really, honestly, cannot think of anything else to recommend, that I would be willing to use on my son (besides just plain water).

Finally, and I am running out of steam here... pre-conception detox is a vital way to ensure that your health (and your partner's health) is in optimal condition to conceive, and that you give your baby the best start in life. It involves changing your diet (cutting out sugar, caffeine, alcohol, dairy, wheat etc) cleaning out your home environment (cleaning products, personal care products etc) and removing sources of stress and anxiety in your life. A fantastic book on this is called Natural Way to Better Babies it's also published as "Healthy Parents, Better Babies". A great starting point. More on this later, I promise!

how things have changed (for the better)

When I was pregnant with my son almost three years ago I had to search far and wide to find natural and organic products for him to wear, be bundled in, play with, eat and drink out of etc... now I get an email from Amazon today sending me a link to pages and pages of Organic Baby Products...

It's a great time to be having an organic baby! Lately I have been feeling a bit guilty about using my first child (and only child for the moment) as a bit of a guinea pig... as much research as I did the first time around, doing a full detox before conceiving, eating mostly organic food, using hypnobirthing techniques in a midwife-run birthing centre, breastfeeding him for two years, dressing him in organic cotton, etc etc etc... there are so many more things that I would do differently if I could...

I would...
- have less (or possible zero) ultrasounds (sonograms). I had three the first time... one at 10 weeks, 12 weeks and 20 weeks.
- delay immunizations longer (and maybe not get all of them?).
- not eat nuts while pregnant or breastfeeding (I ate a lot of hazelnuts and now my son is allergic to them, even though he's never eaten them!).
- use safer bottles/sippy cups.
- have a better bed for co-sleeping.
- have my soil testing before baby starts eating it!
- travel less (especially less radiation-filled airplane flights).

You get the picture... I will blog more on all of these topic later (hopefully sooner), but in the meantime if you have any comments, suggestions, questions, etc on any of the issues I've mentioned (or anything else) please feel free to leave a comment!